This paper extends the literature on the information content of financial variables with respect to future economic growth. It shows that variables originating from both the equity market and the bond market in Switzerland are useful indicators for forecasting the Swiss business cycle. In...

In this paper we discuss some statistical pitfalls that may occur in modeling cross-dependences with copulas in financial applications. In particular we focus on issues arising in the estimation and the empirical choice of copulas as well as in the design of time-dependent copulas.

In this paper we present a model to price and hedge basket credit derivatives andcollateralised loan obligation. Based upon the copula-approach by Schönbucher and Schubert (2001) the model allows a specification of the joint dynamics of credit spreads and default intensities, including a...

In this paper we provide a convenient econometric framework for the analy-sis of nonlinear dependence in financial applications. We introduce models withconstrained nonparametric dependence, which specify the conditional distrib-ution or the copula in terms of a one-dimensional functional...

The aim of this paper is to extend the results of Jarrow, Yu (2001) onthe spread term structures of corporate bonds. We first consider differentcharacterisations of these term structures, when the available informationcorresponds to the default histories of the firms. The approach is then...

The challenge of international term structure models is to simultaneously account for the properties of interest rate term structures and foreign exchange rates within an arbitrage-free framework. We extend the quadratic term structure models proposed in Leippold and Wu (2002) to multiple...

In this paper we discuss the implementation of general one-factor short rate models with a trinomial tree. Taking the Hull-White model as a starting point, our contribution is threefold. First, we show how trees can be spanned using a set of general branching processes. Secondly, we improve...

We develop a continuous time general equilibrium model for the term structure of interest rates where economic agents are averse to model uncertainty and consider the possibility of a misspecified dynamic model for the latent risk factors driving interest rates. Aversion to model uncertainty is...

We develop intuitive expressions for the spread between a forwardcontract and a similar futures contract taking into account the pos-sibility of counterparty default. We evaluate these expressions nu-merically and show that the forward-futures spread is significant forrealistic parameter...

This project identi.es and quanti.es two potential sources of model riskin the valuation of basket credit derivatives. The frameworkemployed is that of a latent variable model with factor structure which enjoys a great popularity in the .nancial industry as well as in academia. Preliminary...